Jacobi

“ The philosophy of Jacobi is essentially unsystematic. A certain fundamental view which underlies all his thinking is brought to bear in succession upon those systematic doctrines which appear to stand most sharply in contradiction to it, and any positive philosophic results are given only occasionally. The leading idea of the whole is that of the complete separation between understanding and apprehension of real fact. ”

“ The problem of three bodies has been treated in various ways since the time of Lagrange, but no decided advance towards a more complete algebraic solution has been made, and the problem stands substantially where it was left by him. He had made a reduction in the differential equations to the seventh order. This was elegantly accomplished in a different way by Jacobi in 1843. ”

“ Abel's theorem was pronounced by Jacobi the greatest discovery of our century on the integral calculus. The aged Legendre, who greatly admired Abel's genius, called it "monumentum aere perennius. During the few years of work allotted to the young Norwegian, he penetrated new fields of research, the development of which has kept mathematicians busy for over half a century. ”

“ A Jacobin who reasoned as much as he is accused of reasoning would be sometimes accessible to the voice of reason. Now, observation proves, from the time of the Revolution to our own days, that the Jacobin is never influenced by reasoning, however just, and it is precisely here that his strength resides. ”

“ Jacobina knows her friends and her foes as well as her master! Jacobina never injures her friends, never forgives foes. Look to yourself! look to yourself! insult my cat, insult me! Swear at Jacobina, indeed!"
"If she steals my cream!" cried Peter"Did she ever steal your cream?" ”

“ You observe, with some surprize, that I make no mention of the Jacobins— the fact is, that until now I have heard very little about them. Your English partizans of the revolution have, by publishing their correspondence with these societies, attributed a consequence to them infinitely beyond what they have had pretensions to:—a prophet, it is said, is not honoured in his own country—I am sure a Jacobin is not. ”

“ Instinctively, as well as by doctrine and tradition, the Jacobins are exacting, disposed to regard themselves as the representatives of the real and the ideal people, that is to say, as sovereigns by right, above the law, entitled to make it and therefore to unmake it, or, at least, strain it and interpret it as they please. ”

“ No man of common prudence will profess himself openly a Jacobite. By so doing he not only may injure his private fortune, but he must render himself less able to do any effectual service to the cause he has embraced; therefore there are but few such men in the kingdom. Your right Jacobite, Sir, disguises his true sentiments. ”

“ No; we have met several times at the Jacobins, but I have avoided speaking with him. He has imitated my reserve. For the rest, I must do him this justice—he has always expressed himself in favorable terms concerning me, true to his promise, that, however little reliance he placed in my uprightness and the sincerity of my convictions, he would hold his opinion secret until my acts themselves denounced me. ”

“ It was more easy for a Whig official to whip a white rose out of the button hole of a ‘gentle’ Jacobite’s coat, and draw a little Jacobite blood in the process, than it was to suppress the seditious sayings and doings of the common people. ”

“ A Jacobite, Sir, believes in the Divine Right of kings. He who believes in the Divine Right of kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the Divine Right of bishops. He that believes in the Divine Right of bishops believes in the Divine Authority of the Christian Religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig, for Whiggism is a negation of all principle.’
DEATH OF THE DUKE OF CUMBERLAND.
Be this as it may, Jacobitism was as surely dying out as he was who had crushed the hopes of Jacobites at Culloden. ”

“ The Jacobins behold these popular measures with extreme jealousy, as a means which may in time render the legislature independent of them; and it is certainly not the least of their discontents, that, after all their labours in the common cause, they find themselves excluded both from power and emoluments. ”

“ It is noticeable that many of the Jacobin agents were men who had failed in the ordinary walks of life, and who were consequently bitter against social laws. In their compassion for suffering and their contempt for the magic of wealth, the Jacobins fell into the opposite excess, professed to find magic in poverty, and regarded ignorance and destitution as entitled to honour in themselves. Recalling the doctrine of their master, that in a state of Nature men's instincts are good, they refused to recognise the frailty of humanity, and forgot that misfortune is sometimes due to fault. ”

“ Clear from any direct imputation, had he then given himself up, he would have been released; and he might have been deterred from a participation in the disastrous scenes which ensued. He had now two children, a son and a daughter. He had many valuable considerations to forfeit for the one abstract principle of indefeasible right to the throne. Few men had more to venture. Many of the Jacobites went into the field with tarnished characters, and with ruined fortunes: they might gain,—they could not lose by the perilous undertaking. ”

“ The history of the Jacobites properly begins with the brave and conscientious men who followed James the Second to France, or fought and bled for him in the United Kingdom. Of the few nobles whom that Monarch had distinguished by his friendship when Duke of York, or graced with his favours when King, three only in Scotland remained attached openly to his interests: these were the Duke of Gordon, the Lord Balcarras, and Claverhouse of Dundee, who may be regarded as the parents of the Jacobite party in Scotland. ”

“ All parties, Whig, Tory or Radical, became Jacobite at heart, and admirers of absolute power. The Whigs talked about the liberty of the subject, and the Radicals about the rights of man still, but neither party cared a straw for what it talked about, and mentally swore that, as soon as by means of such stuff they could get places, and fill their pockets, they would be as Jacobite as the Jacobs themselves. ”

“ The Jacobin party are daily gaining ground; and since they have forced a ministry of their own on the King, their triumph has become still more insolent and decisive.—A storm is said to be hovering over us, which I think of with dread, and cannot communicate with safety—"Heaven square the trial of those who are implicated, to their proportioned strength!"— Adieu. ”

“ As a political sect, the Jacobins can be compared to none that ever existed, for none but themselves ever thought of an organized, regular, and continued system of murdering and plundering the rich, that they might debauch the poor by the distribution of their spoils. They bear, however, some resemblance to the frantic followers of John of Leyden and Knipperdoling, who occupied Munster in the seventeenth century, and committed, in the name of religion, the same frantic horrors which the French Jacobins did in that of freedom. ”

“ The normal Jacobin was a remarkable type. He has been excellently described by Louis Blanc as something powerful, original, sombre; half agitator and half statesman; half puritan and half monk half inquisitor and half tribune. These words of the historian are the exact prose version of the figure of Cimourdain, the typical Jacobin of the poet. "Cimourdain was a pure conscience, but sombre. He had in him the absolute. He had been a priest and that is a serious thing. Man, like the sky, may have a dark serenity; it is enough that something should have brought night into his soul. ”

“ Real's eyes through the open door made him once more cast away all ceremony, notwithstanding his rebuke he had received in the morning. On the right of the monarch stood La Guesle, the Procureur Général, while at the king's feet knelt the very Jacobin friar whom St. Real had seen in conversation with that officer about half an hour before. The monk seemed in the act of presenting a letter; but though that action, and his whole demeanour, appeared perfectly pacific, yet St. Real was convinced, from his previous knowledge, that the ultimate designs of the Jacobin must be evil ”

“ But the important Jacobin leaders were men of education, although they often condescended in pursuit of popularity to adopt worse manners than their own.
It was through their success in organisation that these [Pg 144] men attained to power. From the first the Jacobin Society in Paris, with its many great names and high prestige, had attained an exceptional position, and that position it immensely strengthened by establishing branch societies all over France. ”

“ They come from above,—these things,—and the hearts of the people must be accustomed to them by the sermons and expiations. Those who will not submit, like the Jews and Lutherans, will be forced to do so, and the Jacobins"—in speaking of the Jacobins Anna-Marie looked suddenly at Mr. Goulden and blushed up to her ears, for he was smiling.
But she recovered herself, and went on:
"Among the Jacobins there are some very good people, but the poor must live. The Jacobins have taken the property of the poor and that is not right." ”

“ Graf Solms had such boxes made of tin with the name Jacobi inside. Both Martin and Werner instance the request8 of a Protestant vicar, Johann David Goll in Trossingen, for a “Lorenzodose” with the promise to subscribe to the oath of the order, and, though Protestant, to name the Catholic Franciscan his brother. ”

“ The Jacobites, he says, do all they can to perswade the Nation that their pretended King is a Protestant in his Heart, tho’ he dares not declare it while under the Power of France; that he is acquainted with the Mistakes of his Father’s Government, will govern us more according to Law, and endear himself to his Subjects.
They magnifie the Strength of their own Party, and the Weakness and Divisions of the other, in order to facilitate and hasten their Undertaking; they argue themselves out of their Fears, and into the highest assurance of accomplishing their purpose. ”

“ One may fancy the glances that went up to the royal box on the king’s nights, when the above words were emphasised; and the smiles among the Jacobite ladies, when Wolf paid the following compliment to their White Rose fidelity: ‘To give them their due, we have no Spirits among us like the Women; the Ladies have supported our Cause with a surprising constancy. Oh! there’s no daunting them even with ill-success! They will starve their very Vanities, their Vices, to feed their Loyalty! ”

“ The genuine Jacobite ballads excited much attention; old Jacobites were amused rather than gratified by viewing Cumberland in Hell, and younger people whose sympathies had first been awakened (in 1805) by ‘Waverley,’ were subdued to a sentiment of love and pity for the Stuart whose sufferings are detailed in song, and the loyalty of whose adherents is so touchingly illustrated in ardent, sometimes ferociously attuned, minstrelsy. ”

“ But with regard to the practicability of the course to be pursued, the right honourable gentleman says, he is looking forward to a time when there shall be no dread of Jacobin principles. I ask whether he does not think, from the fraud, oppression, tyranny, and cruelty with which the conduct of France has marked them, that they are not now nearly dead, extinct, and detested? But who are the Jacobins? Is there a man in this country who has at any time opposed Ministers, who has resisted the waste of public money and the prostitution of honours, that has not been branded with the name? ”

“ Like Jacobi and many other young men who became eminent mathematicians, Abel found the first exercise of his talent in the attempt to solve by algebra the general equation of the fifth degree. In 1821 he entered the University in Christiania. The works of Euler, Lagrange, and Legendre were closely studied by him. The idea of the inversion of elliptic functions dates back to this time. His extraordinary success in mathematical study led to the offer of a stipend by the government, that he might continue his studies in Germany and France. ”

“ His heroism may excite less admiration even than the resignation of those who had more to lose; but his intrepidity, his courageous sincerity, his contempt of all display, his carelessness of himself, and the tender concern which he evinced for others, are qualities which we should not be English not to appreciate and venerate. His were the finest attributes of the soldier and the Jacobite: the firm, unflinching adherence; the enthusiastic loyalty ”

“ Never were two parties more strongly contrasted than the Hanoverians and the Jacobites. The very expressions which each party used towards the other, as well as their conduct in the strife, are characteristic of the coarse insolence of possession, and the gallant contest for restoration. Nothing could present a more revolting contrast than that between the individuals who headed the armies of Government, and the unfortunate Prince Charles and his brave adherents. ”

“ Quidnuncs in the Cheapside taverns made light of ‘your James III.’ They advised him to learn to get his bread by tile-making, by cutting corns, by selling Geneva, or by turning horse-doctor. They cocked their hats as they swaggered home on the causeway, but the low whistling of a Jacobite air, by some hopeful person on the opposite side of the street, showed them that the White Rose was not so withered as they thought it to be. Men’s minds were anxious as to coming struggles, though the Hanoverians affected much, and well-founded, confidence. ”